In roller bearing technology, it is generally known that sleeve bearings have the structural form of roller bearings that have the smallest radial overall height and make possible, in particular, room-saving and installation-friendly bearings with high radial load bearing capacity. Such sleeve bearings that can be pressed into a housing or onto a shaft are often used as an economical alternative to cylindrical roller bearings in automotive and mechanical engineering and are known in a construction as housing-mounted sleeve bearings, for example, from DE 195 12 668 A1. The running ring of such sleeve bearings essentially is formed, depending on the construction as a housing-mounted or shaft-mounted sleeve bearing, from a cylindrical outer casing or inner casing, whose inner circumferential surface or outer circumferential surface is constructed as a raceway for bearing rollers, as well as from two radially inward or outward directed rims that are formed on the axial end sides of the outer casing or inner casing and are provided as axial guidance of the bearing rollers.
The production of the running ring of this known sleeve bearing is realized according to the method described according to the method similarly described in DE 195 12 668 A1 such that first a pot-shaped drawn part including a base and a casing is formed from a round blank by a one-step or multi-step deep drawing process, wherein this drawn part is constructed slightly longer than the axial width plus a rim height of a running ring and its casing has reduced thickness on its side facing away from the base. In a second processing step, a central part of the base is punched from the drawn part so that a first rim designated as fixed rim is produced on the running ring and in a third processing step the casing of the drawn part is cut in the area of its reduced thickness, in order to remove the non-uniform drawn edge on the drawn part. Then, in a fourth processing step, the casing is flanged radially inward over a flange edge at the beginning of the reduced thickness, so that a second rim designated as flanged rim is produced with a small recess on the running ring, and finally, the formed flanged rim is corrected to the diameter of the fixed rim in a fifth processing step by a drilling process.
A disadvantage in the running rings produced by this method, however, is that their rims have different thicknesses due to the production, so that the sleeve bearings formed with such running rings must always be mounted directed into/onto their bearing seat. This is necessary because the shafts to be supported are typically constructed with a profile adapted to the shaft bending in the raceway region, so that, for an inverted side installation of the roller bearing, the roller set is loaded eccentrically and this could cause a dangerous axial thrust in the roller bearing. In addition, the known running rings have the disadvantage that the running ring constructed with the fixed rim is typically completely hardened and the flanged rim side is soft-annealed again, to be able to close this side after placement of the roller ring. Soft-annealing the flanged rim side, however, also unavoidably softens part of the raceway area, so that the raceway experiences increased wear at this point, which reduces the service life of the roller bearing. It has also proven disadvantageous in such running rings that these have a small volume-limited recess only on the flanged rim, wherein this recess can be used as an additional lubricant reservoir, so that the sleeve bearing must be supplied with more lubricant at relatively short intervals or has only a relatively short service life. The described production of these running rings also has the disadvantage that relatively high sectioning and tool costs result due to the relatively high number of required production steps for each running ring.